


know you're not alone, 'cause i'm gonna make this place your home

by arklaygothic (clockworkcorvids)



Series: try your whole life to be righteous and be good [3]
Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse), Resident Evil - All Media Types
Genre: Cute, F/F, First Kiss, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Love Confessions, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Post-Resident Evil 2, Romance, Self-Reflection, Suicidal Thoughts, i cant be bothered to retag everything from parts 1 & 2, implied and in the past, it was canon anyways, leon is addicted to energy drinks, no beta we die like men, ruh roh im projecting again, theyre gay and in love, this time with bonus content for the lesbians
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-05
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:20:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24017365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clockworkcorvids/pseuds/arklaygothic
Summary: Things are finally starting to settle into place.
Relationships: Leon S. Kennedy/Chris Redfield, Rebecca Chambers/Claire Redfield
Series: try your whole life to be righteous and be good [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1655023
Comments: 8
Kudos: 70





	know you're not alone, 'cause i'm gonna make this place your home

**Author's Note:**

> knock knock my childhood called and it brought [home](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTg1n95--KE) by phillip phillips  
> and knock knock my teenage years (now) called and brought angst, talking through your mental illness issues with someone who Gets It™️, chugging too many energy drinks, and getting gayer every year  
>  ~~can you tell i've been having a rough time these last couple of months~~

__

_ 2 new voicemails. _

_ 1: November 23, 1998. 13:03. _

_ Hey, Claire! So I know this is out of nowhere but I’m over at the shopping mall up north a bit because I had to drive up here to get some equipment from the local medical supply store, and they wouldn’t ship it to me without this  _ ridiculous _ pricing, and I have to pay cash anyways just in case my card is being tracked - long story, I’m getting off track. Anyways, I did get the stuff I needed without any corporate assassinations involved, although I might ask Chris to help me unload the stuff from my car. Or you could do it. You’re probably strong enough, after pushing bookshelves around and running from the Tyrant. There’s - ugh, I got off track  _ again _ , see, this is what you do to me, but I love you, and  _ anyways _ , there’s this really cool bike shop up here, it just opened up recently, and I was thinking we could go together sometime soon, on a date. I know you - wait, this isn’t - oh, no, how do you delete - fuck! _

_ 2: November 23, 1998. 13:07. _

_ Hi, Chris, it’s Rebecca. Shit, sorry - that was embarrassing - I - ugh. Chris, I need to start organizing my contacts differently so I don’t keep getting the two C. Redfields mixed up. I don’t really know what to say, except that I know you won’t judge me. But if you mention this to Leon, oh  _ man _ are you gonna have it coming to you. Although, come to think of it, that might be incentive to get you to stop being so emotionally stunted. Listen to me, I’m rambling again. Have a good one, C. Redfield number two! _

* * *

After the chaos of what came to be known as the Raccoon City Destruction Incident, there was the aftermath.

The getting-away part. The quiet. 

Long enough at Rebecca’s made it stop feeling like an aftermath and start feeling, instead, like the eerie calm before the storm. 

See, it was all a whole fucking mess and a half, because there was the quest to take down Umbrella, and Chris knew if he wasn’t careful - and probably if he  _ was _ , anyways - it would consume his entire fucking life, directly and by the proxy of consuming the lives of everyone he loved. And they had a kid, too, in the strange little thing they called a family, and she’d seen some shit, but she was far too young to be handling a gun and fighting Umbrella in any way that mattered. 

So he let that stand as a representation of how the rest of them should be treating themselves. No fighting. No BOWs, garden-variety zombies or Tyrants or anything in between. No massive conspiracies. Although...There was still Claire’s ever-growing collection of knives, and she had barely finished teaching Leon to ride a motorbike well enough that he wouldn’t immediately kill himself and render her brand-new bike insurance policy necessary before he was pulling stupid stunts, and empty coffee cups piled up in a corner of the makeshift lab Rebecca had in her apartment when she became particularly busy in her ongoing investigation into the T-Virus. And the G-Virus. And whatever the hell else Umbrella had concocted right under Raccoon City’s collective noses.

And Chris also tended to overthink quite a lot. To beat himself up for not doing enough even when he was already injured from pushing himself too far. The remainder of STARS, along with Claire and Leon, had spent a good month reminding him to rest, a good portion of which was phone calls from Jill that ended in both of them sobbing after talking about all they’d lost. For his housemates’ part, they’d more or less resorted to taking shifts to make sure he didn’t randomly decide to sneak out and break into the nearest Umbrella subsidiary in the middle of the night.

See, everyone was hurting after Raccoon City, especially Chris. He had barely started to process his trauma from Spencer Mansion when... _ it _ happened.  _ It. _ The Raccoon City Destruction Incident. Minced words and formalities aside,  _ it  _ was the destruction of Chris’ home, and he wanted nothing more than to seek out revenge - on Wesker, on the Birkins, on whoever else had had a hand in the whole mess. Umbrella itself. He wanted to seek out revenge on three dead people and who knew how many more that he had never met. It didn’t take a brain like Rebecca’s to understand that that was unhealthy, and anyways, Chris was smarter than people assumed, not just when it came to tactics and knife-throwing. 

Still, there were plenty of times that Claire passed him in the hallway, late at night, the two of them recognizing each other’s thought processes and footfall patterns enough that she stopped his train of thought with nothing more than a silent gaze. Plenty of times that he found himself in Rebecca’s makeshift lab, picking up coffee cups and takeout containers while she rambled about papers she’d read and how angry she was about  _ everything _ , and they both knew they were just trying to keep each other grounded. Plenty of times that Chris left the apartment to do menial tasks and Sherry gave him a hug as he crossed the threshold, staring at him with a telltale look in her wide eyes (it said,  _ Everyone keeps leaving me, please don’t let this be goodbye, please come back) _ . Plenty of times that he was lying awake and he looked across the bedroom he shared with Leon to find the other man doing the same, the two of them meeting each other’s eyes with a shared gaze of some painful, mutual understanding. 

All of them itched for revenge, because violence had been the fuel that kept their fires burning throughout the hell that had been the last few days of Raccoon City. Violence had been the only thing that got Chris and Jill and Rebecca out of Spencer Mansion alive when they found themselves betrayed and facing down superhuman, inhuman - definitively  _ not _ human - monsters. It wasn’t ideal. More violence would create more violence, the cycle would keep going, and everyone would hurt. Before they could take down Umbrella, they needed to heal. 

And as Chris found while fall steadily melted away into winter, sometimes healing takes you to strange places, like right under your nose, when you start to see things in a new light.

Well. 

Maybe he wasn’t seeing things in a new light so much as finally beginning to see things at all. It wasn’t that the light had changed, but rather that he’d been proverbially standing in the darkness all along, and had only now adjusted to having light by which to see. 

The fact that Claire and Rebecca’s relationship was of a romantic and/or sexual nature - that was something that had been right under his nose. He’d been aware of the possibility, had noticed most of the individual parts that comprised the whole, but hadn’t really put it all together until it was right in front of him, impossible to miss. It wasn’t really his business, hence his not prying, but he also finally began to notice, as the air coming in through cracked windows in Rebecca’s - the  _ family’s _ \- apartment became colder with every passing day, that something lingering beneath his ribcage, nesting in between bones, electrifying his entire body with a fuzzy warmth not unlike that which he imagined a cat lying in direct sunlight might feel, that thing was growing. Becoming warmer. It was good, nice -  _ kind _ ; there was a subtle but important difference between the two - and it was persistent, sticking around as some ambient background noise that was the opposite of bothersome.

He wasn’t used to good things sticking around, tended to mentally count down how long he thought it would take before whatever given part of his life went to shit more often than not - he’d done this even before Spencer Mansion, but it was worse these days. Especially when the good thing was something - a relationship - that had the potential to become something more, and even if it didn’t, still managed to be such a wonderful part of Chris’ life. 

See, where he hadn’t felt companionship and appreciation towards Wesker, he’d more or less idolized the man in a way that often bordered on attraction. Regardless of how they chose to interpret it, everyone who saw the two work together noticed it, Chris was sure, and so of course Wesker himself would know. Would tease Chris, subtly, just barely pushing and prodding at his boundaries, never enough to commit to anything but always just enough to keep Chris on his toes. At the time, he’d looked forward to it, the anticipation and adrenaline of whatever encounter they would have where Wesker would say something maybe just a little flirtatious, would show off his skills in a way he knew would always impress Chris.

In hindsight, it had just been manipulation.

Spencer Mansion had happened, and Chris had been left in the aftermath with all the pieces of what he thought he’d known, what he thought he could be sure of, crumbling to dust and slipping through his fingers. One thing was clear, above all - forget how it was classed, romance or friendship or admiration or fucking  _ whatever _ , he couldn’t believe he’d ever felt anything for Wesker. That he’d been blind, just because he’d felt something approaching the sensation of sunlight a few times when Wesker had pulled certain strings with his meticulously constructed compliments.

Leon was not Wesker, though. Leon did not seek to impress Chris, except by fitting three slices of pizza in his mouth at once or pulling what he called a “sick-ass move” on Claire’s Harley that, miraculously, did  _ not _ result in a trip to the ER. Leon did not manipulate Chris, even though he probably could if he wanted to, except by putting on that stupidly irresistible pout and draping himself across the nearest piece of furniture whilst imploring Chris to stop limiting the readily available caffeine supply in the apartment. Leon, and his relationship with Chris, though, were not just to be defined by what they were  _ not _ . Leon  _ did _ many things, as well - chief amongst them, in Chris’ mind: his overall presence in Chris’ life created the feeling that Chris had taken to describing as sunlight.

There were the small things, too. Checking in on Chris’ still-healing injuries, even though he’d been recovering from a nasty gunshot wound to the shoulder since Raccoon City. Staying awake and sitting in silence with Chris when the nightmares kept one or both of them awake. Being an incredible, unwavering, steady friend to Claire. Walking the long way home from the dojo to order takeout from the place that had Chris’ favorite comfort food (which was only such by proxy, since it was really Claire’s favorite comfort food, and he’d just eaten it so much because of her that it now had the same effect on him).

And, okay, those were just the symptoms of being a kind person, but when coupled with the fact that Chris had already had some sort of latent attraction to Leon more or less from the start, he was a lost cause. Partly, it was the fact that he fell hopelessly in love with basically anyone who could beat him in a fight without just using brute strength, and partly, he thought it wasn’t worth it to attempt to put a name and label on every single source of his feelings when the important bit was that they were  _ there _ and they were  _ real _ . He didn’t think he’d ever pin down a precise reason as to why, exactly, he was head over fucking heels for Leon Scott Kennedy, but  _ fuck _ . He sure  _ was _ . 

* * *

“Hey,” Leon said, “what if I bought energy drinks?” He emerged from the aisle next to Chris in the convenience store they were in, a devilish grin on his face and a brightly colored cardboard box in his hands.

“Leon, it’s three in the morning. I think your decision-making skills are impaired.” Chris turned from where he’d been examining the nutrition facts of various brands of mac ‘n’ cheese.

“Bold of you to assume I ever had decision-making skills in the first place.” Leon replied. He slowly reached down to place the case of energy drinks in their cart, eyeing Chris the whole time as if he expected the other man to suddenly roundhouse kick it out of his hands or something. Had such an act not meant Chris would have to pay for the drinks, he would have considered it.

“You already drink enough coffee.” Chris chose the mac ‘n’ cheese that looked least likely to clog arteries over time, and shoveled three boxes into the cart. (Hey, it had a long shelf life, he never knew when Umbrella’s hellscape might spread out here to his new home, and it was also on sale.)

Leon sighed, leaning on the side of the cart in a way that would have made it slide out from under him had Chris not been holding it steady. “And I’d drink more if  _ somebody _ didn’t fucking ration it like a health nut soccer mom. These bad boys - ” he patted the top of the energy drink case, which Chris still refused to more than glance at, because acknowledging its presence in the cart meant he wouldn’t be able to resist checking the inevitably disappointing nutrition facts “ - are so much better than coffee. Will I drive myself up the wall with a sugar overdose and make a bad impression on Sherry? Yes. But will I be able to stay focused long enough to fucking finish my goddamn work? Also yes.”

“You literally did not need to pick such a demanding job,” Chris said, referring to Leon’s recent employment by USSTRATCOM’s Anti-Umbrella Pursuit and Investigation Team, which was a horrible mouthful and almost as difficult to remember as all the details of Leon’s training.

“They recruited me. And anyways, I need to stay on my toes.” They’d had this argument before, so many times that it wasn’t even really an argument anymore, nor had it ever been much of that. It was just bickering, casual enough that they could rehash it at three in the morning in a convenience store and feel only the slightest distress. And where it wasn’t joking, it was nothing more than Chris projecting the faults he had when it came to putting too much of a burden on his shoulders onto Leon. They both had guilt complexes the size of Mount Olympus, after all.

Chris rolled his eyes. “Fine. Buy the damn energy drinks, Leon. But I’m keeping them under my bed, and if I see you trying to drink more than one a day, you’ll regret it.”

Leon took a few moments to yawn, and Chris was pretty sure he heard the other man’s jaw pop in the process. “You gonna stop me? You gonna wake up and stop me?”

Chris gently gave the cart a shove, just enough to make Leon stumble. He caught himself with a disheartened scowl that quickly became a smirk of challenge.

“Asshole,” Leon said.

Chris pulled their half-finished shopping list out of his pocket, smoothed out the crumpled scrap of paper to the best of his ability, and passed it to Leon. 

“Stop complaining and go stock up on cereal. Make sure you get the slightly sugary ones that Sherry likes, but - ”

“Yeah, I know,” Leon said, and the next few words came out of both their mouths in unison, Leon tossing his head from side to side as he quoted Chris verbatim.

“ - not  _ too _ sugary, and Rebecca prefers instant oatmeal.”

Leon leaned over the cart to pass the list back to Chris. Their hands brushed as they did so, and Chris wondered how he’d ever managed to go from his interesting but mostly normal lifestyle to absolute chaos and then back - no, not  _ back _ , but forward, ever-changing nonetheless - into such normalcy. Such horribly, wonderfully mundane things like lingering touches of hands and bickering over groceries at three in the morning.

Leon grinned. “Don’t worry, Redfield. I know what I’m doing.”

Chris moved on from mac ‘n’ cheese to non-edible household amenities, and with no nutrition facts to be found on the side of a 12-pack of toilet paper, he instead found himself thinking about Leon.

* * *

It was three in the morning, again, and Chris and Leon were awake and out of the apartment,  _ again _ . They weren’t exactly all the way out of the apartment this time, just on the roof, but they also weren’t exactly supposed to be up there, so. There was that. And also, Chris had found Leon with his shoulders pressed against the corner between concrete walls, arms crossed over his knees, an energy drink in one hand and two identical - empty - cans on the ground next to him, staring off at the city skyline, and it was cold as all hell that night. It hung in a balance, between its midnight state of being and its pre-dawn state of being, inching through the darkest hours of night before the sky began to lighten, when only the lights of the most dedicated 24/7 establishments were on.

Leon was hanging in a balance, too, between stability and a full-on breakdown. His hands were shaking when Chris found him, and he silently allowed Chris to pry the half-empty can out of his grip, evidently having the presence of mind to realize that he was making a mistake. 

Chris sat next to him, back against the concrete. It was cold in a way that grounded him firmly in the present moment, pushing against his shoulders through the fabric of his hoodie. He could hear cars, the wavelengths of their humming engines changing from blue to red in Doppler shifts as they passed by. Compressed air. Longitudinal waves. Parallel movement. 343 meters per second was the speed of sound through air. He didn’t know why he was thinking about physics. 

“You gonna say anything?” Leon croaked.

Chris turned his head sideways. Let his chin rest on his own shoulder. Gingerly set the half-empty energy drink can at his side - the side farther from Leon. 

“I guess I will now,” he replied. “You’re going to wind up in the hospital if you keep this up. You probably would have, if I hadn’t found you up here.”

“I still might.” He sounded tired, downright exhausted. Nonchalant, despite it all. 

“Is that what you want?”

In the pause, Chris vividly took in the sound of Leon’s breath. In through his nose, shaky. Out through his mouth, through barely parted teeth, even shakier. Shallow. 

“I’m not suicidal. I used to be. It was worst right after I got to Raccoon City. But not after I met Sherry. I couldn’t do that to her.  _ Can’t _ do that to her.” He breathed again, a few cycles of air through his lungs, and Chris watched his shoulders rise and fall, didn’t rush him. He had to be cold, too, even though he was wearing a jacket too. “But yes. Maybe.”

His head fell, hands coming up to press against either temple. “I don’t  _ know _ what I want. I’m just stressed, and angry, and sometimes it feels like I’m just a fucking puppet, I don’t even know whose, maybe the government or Umbrella or whatever the hell god there is, maybe just my own puppet -  _ I don’t fucking know! _

“And...I started with the energy drinks because I was so fucking exhausted in every way, and coffee wasn’t enough, but now it’s...if I push my body to its limits it reminds me that I’m actually a real fucking person. And I’m not going to drink. I’m not going to fucking do that, not with Sherry here, I know better than to be that kind of piece of shit, but I need to do  _ something _ .

“Besides...it keeps me awake. To do all my work. Although I’d probably be better off just trying to sleep like a normal person and cracking down on my time management when I’m awake.”

Chris’ gaze flickered to the edge of the roof, so close, so accessible, so  _ easy _ . Leon could be lying, just to make Chris let his guard down. Fuck, Chris knew  _ he’d _ done shit like that before, and would have done worse had he not had a support system of people who knew his tells. But he knew Leon’s tells, all too well by now, and he trusted the other man. 

So he stood up. Picked up the can next to him. Picked up - more slowly, he and Leon watching each other’s every move - the two other empty cans next to Leon. 

“I’m going to go get you some water, okay?” Chris asked, although he knew he was going to do it one way or another even if Leon insisted he didn’t need it. An offering that was really just a gentle order in disguise.  _ Order _ wasn’t the gentlest of words;  _ suggestion _ sounded better, but that implied the possibility of being able to decline. With the amount of sugar - and whatever the hell else, but the sugar was probably the worst of it - in Leon’s system right now, he needed some water. 

“‘Kay,” Leon muttered, the struggle between his exhaustion and the energy drinks and whatever other horrible things were playing out in his head right now very visible on his face.

When Chris came back with a large, but not forebodingly so, glass of water, Leon was still sitting in the exact same position as before. 

“Thanks for watching out for me,” Leon said after taking multiple small sips of the water. Chris got the sense that nobody had really done that for Leon, maybe not ever and definitely at least not for a long time, not until this family that they’d cobbled together from some of the broken pieces Raccoon City had to offer.

“I’d tell you to consider it payback, but I think we’re a long way past keeping score by now.”

Leon took a long, deep breath. Chris waited for him to reply. He took another breath. And another. Chris let him breathe, then, because he needed it, and it wasn’t like they were short on time. Every passing day felt like time that Chris could have spent fighting Umbrella, but then again, he certainly wasn’t the only one feeling that - there was a reason Leon was on the roof working his way up to a caffeine overdose and sugar high at three in the morning; a reason he felt like he needed all that caffeine to stay awake in the first place.

“Are you working on managing your workload?” Chris asked, hesitant, after a long silence.

“Yeah.” There was a distinct note of resignation in Leon’s voice. “I’ve been talking to my therapist about it. That, and time management, and my rampant anxiety issues, and the PTSD.”

“That’s good.” Though the only issue they shared was the PTSD, Chris had been doing the same with his own therapist, and they’d both been making progress. Sometimes it was backwards, nonlinear, but it was progress nonetheless, and any progress was better than stagnation, because it meant the possibility of moving forward. You couldn’t move forward if you didn’t move at all.

The liminality of the night hung over the two of them, an ink-blue sky dotted with stars and hazy clouds, yellow squares of light glinting against the darkened metal and glass they adorned. This particular point on the Earth was in a transitional state of its cycle of day and night, and it felt to Chris as if he, too, were floating on the threshold between two states of being.

“I feel like I’m not doing enough,” Leon said, barely audible over the din of the city and Chris’ own distraction. “Like no matter what I do, I’ll never be able to bring justice to...all of this. This hell that Umbrella’s created.”

“You won’t,” Chris replied, the words out of his mouth with barely a forethought; “no single person could do that. Not even all of STARS, or this whole family, or USSTRATCOM. We just do what we can.”

“I think a lot about the Raccoon City. Lieutenant Branagh died in front of me. The guy who owned the gun shop - his kid - he had to shoot her. Sherry lost both of her parents. An entire fucking black ops team was taken out. And yeah, not everyone was all good, but they weren’t all bad either. So many people died who didn’t deserve it. And before you say I couldn’t save everyone, yeah, logically I  _ know _ that I couldn’t, but I still can’t drive the damn thoughts from my head.”

“Maybe. But you can override them with other things.”

Leon, who had been staring out at the skyline, turned his gaze to Chris. “What do you mean?”

“Think about what you have done. You and Claire got each other through Raccoon City. Sherry wouldn’t have made it out without you two. You...saved my life, back there.”

“That’s…” 

_ That’s different _ , Chris was sure Leon had wanted to say, but the words died on his tongue. He began to slump, sliding down the wall, and for a moment Chris’ heart jolted in fear - was he collapsing from the stress? The caffeine? Both? - but he was shifting sideways, leaning against Chris, head on his shoulder. Chris slowly, gently, with hesitance, slid an arm around Leon’s shoulders, which still shook with an oh-so-slight tremor. This was what they did, family. This was what Chris would have done for any of the others; what he  _ had _ done on many past occasions, comforting them, being a shoulder to cry on. 

It was different with Leon. Not because he was the only other guy, or because he was gay, or even because Chris didn’t know if  _ he _ was gay, but he sure as hell wasn’t as straight as he had once thought. He would do - again, had done - the same, offering comfort and reassurance for male friends, in the past. It was different with Leon because Chris was in love with him, and  _ hell _ , it would have been so easy to reach out, close the gap between them with lips or even a lingering hand, but he couldn’t do that to Leon, not now, not when Leon was falling apart like this. Chris would be whatever Leon needed him to be, and right now, Leon needed nothing more or less than someone to ground him while he rode out the wave of pain in his head. 

* * *

In a move straight out of a cheesy romcom, Chris decided to make his move - that phrase alone almost made him want to gag, because it made him envision a clearly separated, black-and-white division between a friendship and a romantic relationship. One moment, friends; the next, something more. That wasn’t how it worked. That wasn’t how any of this worked. He and Leon had been in their own weird transitional state for so long, a liminal space that intersected friendship, romance, and everything in between. Anyways, Chris decided to officially let Leon know that hello, yes, he was head over heels in love, when Rebecca and Claire were out of town, on one of the dates they frequently went on these days, and Sherry was tagging along with them. However, he did  _ not _ scatter rose petals across the apartment, and he most  _ definitely _ did not light any candles. Fire and Chris, simply put, did not get along too well. It wasn’t that he was scared of it; no, he could appreciate a good fireplace or bonfire when the time was right, it was more that he had doused so many reanimated corpses in gasoline and flicked his lighter open on them that he didn’t want to use the thing without the pretense of death. The pretense of death was, incidentally, something that had punctuated (even  _ punctured _ , if he was being literal) his relationship with Leon from the start, but Chris would rather keep it away from any possible romance if he could. 

Also, Rebecca’s lab work often involved flammables such as copious amounts of alcohol-based preservative, and Chris was smart enough to know that fire was best off staying very,  _ very _ far away from such things, and he wasn’t cheesy. He was mature, and something approaching suave, and he could keep his cool under pressure.

Something like that. 

That morning found the two of them sitting on the roof again, this time without the premise of possible hospitalization. Chris had a smoothie, and Leon had coffee - at the combined insistence of Chris and his therapist, he’d talked to his boss (and then Chris may have also threatened his boss, but if anyone asked, he had just been testifying for Leon’s lack of sleep and sanity) about his workload, and slowly managed to work his way down to usually getting at least seven hours a night. It wasn’t perfect, but it meant he’d barely touched energy drinks in the handful of months since that one incident. Thankfully, as spring began to poke and prod at everything winter had locked up and frozen, it wasn’t ridiculously cold on the roof today, and the breeze was enjoyable. 

This was the kind of thing they did frequently, just sitting in the same space and enjoying the presence of another person even without interaction. Chris did it with all of his housemates - all of his family - but it was different with Leon.

Again. 

For the same reasons things were always different with Leon. 

“Hey,” Leon said, when Chris was almost all the way through his smoothie, “you alright? You’ve been quiet.”

Chris blinked. Smiled. Hoped he hadn’t hesitated too much. 

“Yeah,” he replied, “I’m fine. Just thinking.”

Leon, because he was Leon, and he was jaded but first and foremost he was a  _ mischievous  _ bastard, scooted a little closer to Chris, putting them at arm’s length away from each other, and rested one elbow on his knees, cupping his face in his hand. 

“Do tell.”

Chris couldn’t help the smirk that came over his face, but he let it happen despite the nagging anxiety building in his chest as every passing second brought him closer to the moment he wouldn’t be able to turn back. He turned his face down, away from Leon, smiling.

“Don’t make me say it. I don’t want to.”

Maybe he was past that moment, long since past it. Maybe he never could have turned back, even if he’d wanted to.

“C’mon, Chris. Say it.”

How was he supposed to word it? He hadn’t thought this far ahead - well, he  _ had _ , actually, many times, and that made it worse, because he’d considered a billion different ways he could say it, a billion different circumstances under which he would make his feelings known, and all of it was suddenly lost, dead before the words reached his tongue.

So he did something stupid, and impulsive - but wordless - instead. He leaned forward and kissed Leon. And was pulling back just as quickly, after a quick brush of lips, heart racing, palms suddenly slicked with sweat, overcome with warring sensations of guilt and exhilaration. 

“Sorry,” he breathed, “I shouldn’t have - I mean, I want to, but - ”

He cut himself off as he took in Leon’s expression. The other man’s brows were furrowed in utter confusion, utter  _ something _ , it was certainly utter and intense and all-encompassing whatever it was, and his lips were parted just slightly, and a blush was rising on his cheeks. He was trying to read Chris, then, he must have been, trying to figure out what Chris really meant with all the mixed signals he must have been giving off right now.

“You want to kiss me?” Leon asked, simple and plain. Yes or no. There was surely, definitely no backing out now.

Chris’ mouth was dry. Lips dry. Tongue heavy. “Yeah,” he breathed. “And often.”

And jolted; Leon’s hand was cupping his cheek now. Pulling him in. Lips brushing, hesitantly, before they both finally pressed into it, and Chris wished he’d done this ages ago, but he wasn’t about to complain. Now was good. This was good. 

“I think we can make that work,” Leon said, smiling against his lips, after they pulled apart to breathe. 

**Author's Note:**

> thanks 4 reading gaymers i have exams in a week and i am fully prepared to suffer so this is my gift before i drop off the face of the earth for fuck knows how long ~~probably not that long tbh im a fickle motherfucker~~


End file.
